Archive for the ‘time travel’ Category

The physics world got itself into a bit of a tizz this month as scientists at CERN, the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, found an anomaly on one of their experiments, which seemed to show that some particles were travelling faster than light.

Time server's can provide atomic clock accuracy

Faster than light travel for any particle is prohibited of course, according to Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity, but the OPERA team at CERN, who fired neutrinos around a particle accelerator, travelling for 730 km, found that the neutrinos travelled the distance 20 parts per million faster than photons (light particles) meaning they broke Einstein’s speed limit.

While this experiment could prove to be one of the most important discoveries in physics, physicists are remaining sceptical, suggesting that a cause could be an error generated in the difficulties and complexities of measuring such high speeds and distances.

The team at CERN used GPS time servers, portable atomic clocks and GPS positioning systems to make their calculations, which all provided accuracy in distance to within 20cm and an accuracy of time to within 10 nanoseconds. However, the facility is underground and the GPS signals and other data streams had to be cabled down to the experiment, a latency the team are confident they took into account during their calculations.

Physicists from other organisations are now attempting to repeat the experiments to see if they get the same results. Whatever the outcome, this type of groundbreaking research is only possible thanks to the accuracy of atomic clocks that are able to measure time to millionths of a second.

To synchronise a computer network to an atomic clock you don’t need to have access to a physics laboratory like CERN as simple NTP time servers like Galleons NTS 6001 will receive an accurate source of atomic clock time and keep all hardware on a network to within a few milliseconds of it.

Time travel has always been a much loved concept for science fiction writers. From HG Wells’ Time Machine to Back to the Future, travelling forwards or backwards in time has captivated audiences for centuries. However, thanks to the work of modern thinkers like Einstein, it appears that time travel is much a possibility of science fact as it is fiction.

Time travel is not only possible but we do it all the time. Every second that passes is a second further into the future so we are all travelling forward in time. However we think if time travel we imagine a machine that transports individuals hundreds or thousands of years in to the future or past so is that possible.

Well, thanks to Einstein’s theories of general and special relativity, time ravel is certainly possible. We know thanks to the development of atomic clocks that Einstein’s theories about speed and gravity affecting the passage of time is correct. Einstein suggested that gravity would warp space-time (the term he gave to four dimensional space that includes directions plus time) and this has been tested. In fact modern atomic clocks can pick out the minute differences in the passage of time every subsequent inch above the earth’s surface as time speeds up as the effect of the earth’ s gravity weakens.

Einstein predicted speed too would affect time in what he described as time dilation. For any observer travelling close to the speed of light a journey that to an outsider may have taken thousands of years would have passed within seconds. Time dilation means that travelling hundreds of years into the future in a matter of seconds is certainly possible. However, would it be possible to get back again?

This is where many scientists are divided. Strictly speaking theoretical properties of space time do allow for this, although for any travelling back in time a worm hole would have to be created or found. A worm hole is a theoretical link between two parts of space where a traveller could enter one end and appear somewhere completely different at the other end this may be another part of the universe or indeed another point in time.

However, critics of the possibility of time travel point out that because travellers from the future have never visited us that probably means that time travel will never be possible. They also point out the any travelling backwards in time could create paradoxes (what would happen to you if you were mean enough to go back in time and kill your grandparents).

However, time paradoxes exist now. Many computer networks are not synchronised which can lead to errors, loss of data or paradoxes like emails being sent before they were received. To avoid any time crisis it is important for all computer networks to be perfectly synchronised. The best and most accurate method of doing this is to use a NTP time server that receives the time from an atomic clock.